Floyd produced the knife from the back of his belt and waved me toward the kitchen through Mrs. Bellamy’s shotgun-blasted door. Walking to the back door and looking out the screen, I could see the moon had risen. In the silvered light, the outhouse seemed to glow, its door standing open.
Who had it been, I wondered? Who was Floyd’s Daddy? It sure as heck wasn’t Mr. Bellamy.
“Get moving, Vern,” Floyd whispered in my ear. He prodded me in the back with the knife. I could feel a sting, long and thin like from a willow whip.
“Damn, that hurts,” I whispered back. “Lay off the knife or you’re not getting anything. You can’t threaten me any further, just tick me off more.”
“Move. Please. They’re watching both of us.”
It was the ‘please’ which decided me. I moved. I remembered what Pegasus had told me about taking off from inside the barn. And I remembered that I had promised Floyd a messy death. I just wasn’t sure if I’d meant that or not.
Chapter Twelve
Floyd held up an oil lantern as we walked into the barn. The door I had knocked over had been roughly patched and leaned back into place to shield Pegasus from casual observation. In shadow-riddled corners, cat eyes gleamed at us, interrupted in their nightly wars against mice, rats and worse things. The lamp’s light was a rich, almost golden, yellow that flickered in the wind from outside even through its wire-wrapped glass chimney.
Seen in that errant golden glow, Pegasus again looked like a great metal eagle spread for flight. It reminded me of a Charles Grafly sculpture I’d seen at Wichita State, finely-wrought wings set wide to leap in the air. The machine didn’t have feathers or a tail, but rather the whole balance of the thing, the energy it projected even as a static piece of metal, gave the overwhelming impression of a straining need to soar. Looking at it made me feel I could fly, spread my arms and ride the thermals like a red-tailed hawk.
I just stood there in Floyd’s ragged flannel bathrobe, my arm still reeking of shit, bandages on my head and blood trickling down my back from the cut of Floyd’s knife. I felt small, weak, ineffectual. Not because I was a prisoner under a death sentence. No, it was this beautiful machine that had come across time’s deeps, across the empty spaces between worlds, to be here. I looked and felt like a drunk after a hard Saturday night, standing in one of the great cathedrals of Europe braying out of tune with the midnight choir.
“Do you know how to open it?” asked Floyd. In the direction my thoughts had fled, his voice was a profanity, but that profanity brought me back into myself.
Ask permission, I thought, but I didn’t say that. “I think that I can open the pilot’s hatch if I push on it in the right place,” I said carefully.
I desperately hoped that Pegasus would get the hint. The radio handset, heavy in my pocket, still possessed that tingling warmth it had exhibited ever since I first fooled with it. That meant it was active. I hoped.
“Vernon Dunham,” said Pegasus’ voice in my ear. I didn’t dare answer it with Floyd standing right next to me.
“Cripes,” said Floyd. “Get it open.” He stopped talking, dropped the knife into the straw. “Vern… I’m sorry. I don’t know what to do. With you, it’s like with Mama… they’ll hurt me, or worse, if I don’t do what they say.”
Never in his life had I seen Floyd so uncertain. Crazy as his father was, with Mr. Neville around and all those guns, maybe I wouldn’t have behaved any better.
“Let’s figure this out,” I said. I wasn’t going to tell him everything, but if he wanted to talk, show his regrets, I needed to encourage him. “Something will come up.”
I approached the Mack stake bed. Pegasus towered over the truck, filling much of the barn, just as I had seen her that morning. The wing geometries caught my eye and held it, this time as an engineer rather than with that sense of awed supplication that Floyd had just banished. I had been studying, building and flying airplanes for five years. Looking at Pegasus with its wings spread wide I was utterly convinced of its alienness. No human engineer could have conceived those wings. I knew of no equations to explain them.
“Can you open it?” asked Floyd behind me.
“Approach me near my front section,” said Pegasus in my ear.
There was a crate positioned near the middle of the truck that I left there before to help me climb up. Painfully, I swung up to crouch under the spread wings along the narrow margin of the truck bed. Pegasus had unfolded so dramatically that I had to lean backwards to keep my footing. Pegasus’ nose faced the rear of the truck. I worked my way along that direction, feeling the bumps and textures of Pegasus’ skin pass underneath my fingers.
Skin was the only word for it. When I’d first seen the computational rocket, I had thought it milled from a block of metal. Pegasus had been dormant then. Now, I stopped moving, just feeling that skin. At Floyd’s urging, embarrassed by some girls from the junior high, I had once reluctantly held a python at the White Eagle Fair in Augusta. A snake act had shown up, earning a little money by scaring the girls and thrilling the boys at the fall festival. I vividly remembered the densely compact feeling of the snake in my hands, the complex texture of dry scratchiness and flexible tension under my fingers.
Pegasus reminded me of that snake. There was an intense sense of life, a subtle motion under the apparently static skin. That was when I realized that Pegasus was no more an aircraft or a rocket than I was fish. There was some relationship to the physics of airfoils and the mechanics of flight, but my B-29s were creaky toys left behind in a child’s nursery when I set them next to Pegasus.
“What’s the matter? Can’t find the hatch?”
I couldn’t figure if he was angry or what now. Maybe both. “Take it easy, buddy.”
“They’re going to come check soon, Vern.”
I hung onto the rippling skin of the computational rocket and twisted around to look at Floyd. “Floyd Euell Bellamy, if you call me ‘Vern’ one more time, so help me God I will knock you upside the head, carving knife or not. My name is Vernon, and if you can’t remember that, you can just forget getting my help on this thing.”
“I’m sorry,” he said. “But you have to keep working. Or else…”
He was rattled, somewhere between his regrets and his anger. I felt strong, and reckless. The only card I held was Pegasus, and whatever emotionality I could hector out of Floyd. I adopted his father’s tone. “Or else what? You threatening to kill me twice? That’s getting mighty old, Floyd. Think of a better one or shut the heck up.”
Floyd glared at me but said nothing. I wondered why Mr. Bellamy hadn’t sent him up here with a gun. Didn’t trust his own son? Maybe Mr. Neville didn’t trust Floyd. That man held a lot of power over the two Bellamys, for all that everyone said Mr. Bellamy was in charge. Maybe he was a Soviet spy, minding the Bellamy cell.
I turned back towards Pegasus. The thing seemed to breathe.
“Are you ready Vernon Dunham?” asked Pegasus.
“Yes,” I whispered. I tensed myself to scramble inside. I didn’t see any kind of hatch, but I had to trust Pegasus.
“Now,” said the computational rocket. There was a snapping click, and a hole opened in the side of Pegasus, the strangest thing I’d ever seen. It just sort of dialed open — there was no other way to describe it. Like watching someone’s eyes widen.
I was so surprised I lost my balance. My weak leg folded under me, and I fell backward off the truck onto the barn floor.